The Discovery of Roscoe Holcomb and the “High Lonesome Sound”

Bob Dylan has described Holcomb’s work as exhibiting “a certain untamed sense of control.”

Photograph by John Cohen / Getty

The great dragnet of the American folk revival—which began in New York City in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and, lore dictates, started to falter when Bob Dylan powered up an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—resulted in the retrieval and trotting out of various long-retired rural performers, many of whom had been puttering peaceably about their gardens, or convalescing in hospital rooms, when the searchers came knocking. Most had been thinking infrequently about music. Most hadn’t been thinking about New York City at all.

In 1959, John Cohen, a twenty-seven-year-old musician and photographer from Queens, bought a bus ticket to eastern Kentucky. He was looking for “Depression songs” to play with his folk band, the New Lost City Ramblers. “I said to myself, I’m going to go to Kentucky, because they have a depression going on there. I’ve never experienced a depression—all I’ve heard are the records,” he said recently. Cohen was a voracious consumer of traditional music and a dutiful student of its nuances, but he fretted that something was missing—some empathic vantage that he couldn’t quite access, at least not from Manhattan.

Like many amateur folklorists who went trawling the South for undiscovered performers during the first half of the twentieth century, Cohen was craving a more multidimensional sense of how the music he prized functioned in context. With folk music, that idea is particularly paramount. “For years, I’d heard singers—Pete Seeger, Burl Ives—talking about some old guy out on his back porch singing this wonderful music. And I kept thinking, I want to hear that old guy. Who is that old guy? This was a way of getting at that, and at what in that music got to me. What was that feeling? What was that thing? How could I get to that thing?”

What Cohen is referring to—the crippling power that acolytes of old-time music find inherent in these songs, many rooted in a particular region and indicative of a particular time—is a spiritual journey more than a literal one. Mapping the metaphysical pathways that allow human beings to be devastated or buoyed by a series of sounds? That’s a never-ending mission. That’s a mystery as deep as any we’ve got.

But even if a person can’t unlock those doors, she can, at least, participate in their safeguarding. Many musicologists (including, most famously, John Lomax and his son, Alan) had already embarked upon comparable passages south, devoting themselves to the preservation, via field recordings, of endangered strains of vernacular music and other manifestations of fading folk cultures. Sometimes, in hindsight, these transactions feel clumsy, complicated. That vague, collective unease—when does folklore, enacted on impoverished rural communities, begin to mimic a kind of inverted cultural imperialism?—has been exhaustively (if inconclusively) interrogated by scholars and artists for decades. Meanwhile, we are left with a body of recordings that, in their richness, seem to transcend any questioning at all.

Throughout the nineteen-sixties, a number of surviving American visionaries—players like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Reverend Gary Davis, Bessie Jones, and Elizabeth Cotten, musicians who had previously issued only a smattering of commercial releases, if any at all—were granted full second acts.* Some had been briefly introduced to the public in 1952, when Harry Smith compiled his multidisk “Anthology of American Folk Music” for Folkways Records, but most were ciphers, ghosts, disembodied voices embedded in shellac and conjured only by a phonograph needle. That a person in 1964 could shake out a camp blanket, sit down on the lawn at Newport, and listen to Skip James perform “Sick Bed Blues” (“I used to have some friends, but they wish that I were dead”) in that lurching, alien falsetto—that’s just plainly miraculous.

In 1959, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank put together a short film, “Pull My Daisy,” about the Beat Generation; Frank’s first book, “The Americans,” a fiercely unromantic (yet somehow deeply romantic) collection of black-and-white photographs, had redefined Americana when it was published, in 1958. Cohen documented the film’s production as a set photographer, and eventually Life magazine asked to publish one of the portraits he’d taken. In it, Jack Kerouac is leaning toward a radio speaker, listening to a broadcast of himself reading, his hand curled around a stubby volume knob, a mix of self-interest and disdain squeezing his face. He looks a little pinched. Cohen has an incredible aptitude for capturing these sorts of deeply revelatory non-moments. It is a poet’s instinct—find the accidental truth, the inadvertent tell—that’s also evident in the work of Walker Evans, and in all the great American documentarians.

The Life deal mostly meant that Cohen now had enough cash—about six hundred dollars—to pack up his notebook, his Nikon Rangefinder, and a boxy Magnamite tape recorder powered by a hand crank, and split town. He could plan to acquire a used car once he’d arrived in Kentucky. He doesn’t recall the precise make and model he bought, merely that it was a dud. Its failings turned out to be serendipitous. “The car kept breaking down. I kept going to gas stations for help. They’d say, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I’d say, ‘Looking for banjo players, you know any banjo players?’ ”

Last month, Tompkins Square, a San Francisco-based reissue label, released a live recording by a musician named Roscoe Holcomb, made at the San Diego Folk Festival in 1972. Bob Dylan has described Holcomb’s work as exhibiting “a certain untamed sense of control, which makes him one of the best.” I think Dylan was equivocating. For me, Holcomb is easily the greatest American banjo player to have commercially recorded, possessing, as he did, that ineffable combination of virtuosity and openness.

When John Cohen met Holcomb in Daisy, Kentucky, in 1959, Holcomb was forty-seven years old and had never made a recording, nor had he ever considered a career as a musician. Cohen is deliberate on this point; Holcomb wasn’t rediscovered, like some of those other players, he was divined, realized. Found. In an essay printed on the back of the new LP, Cohen writes, “If I hadn’t ‘found’ him in Daisy, Kentucky in 1959, there would be no record of his music. He never had the desire to record, go on radio, or perform in public…. He was little appreciated or recognized back home in Kentucky.”

By the time Cohen came around, Holcomb had been forced into premature retirement. His body was ravaged, licked. He had worked in a coal mine for fifteen cents an hour, worked at a sawmill (where his back got broken), and worked various construction jobs. Now he mostly stayed at home, fixing things, taking intermittent construction gigs, and picking a banjo from time to time. He seemed ambivalent about music. “I don’t like to play anymore. I don’t like the things I used to like. I don’t care enough about it no more. I’m getting old.”

I wonder sometimes if Holcomb considered the idea of a music career ignoble—if he found it hubristic or he found it dumb. He had some pretty stoic notions about work: “I always liked to work. Worked all my life. I enjoyed it,” he told Cohen later. “That’s why it hurts so bad. When you work hard all your life and then just have to give it up.” You get the sense that Holcomb thought playing folk songs was something of a goof.

Regardless of how he felt about his own musicianship, Holcomb was a courageous artist, nearly guileless. Although he was a gifted technician, he never tempered or intellectualized his work. It wasn’t reasoned through or too expertly assembled. Listening to other musicians from this era (or, especially, to contemporary musicians revisiting these repertoires now), you can often see the seams, how the thing got made, like a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle that was upended, pawed through, and shuffled into focus—each piece has been snapped into place, put precisely where it should be.

But it’s hard to be great without also being a little untidy, without raising the stakes, venturing forth some weird, uncomfortable truth. When Holcomb starts to sing in his loud, stick-straight, foghorn voice, my whole body shifts into a hyper-aware, overperceptive state: in the language of our age, this is called “being present,” but it feels more like “being electrified.” Suddenly, you see and feel everything. Comparable situations include being frightened (when, say, someone has followed you down a dark block), or, perhaps more generously, falling in love: nothing matters except whatever is happening directly in front of you.

Cohen would eventually—and famously—describe this as “the high lonesome sound.” For years, he couldn’t even unpack his own response to it. “I thought it was modern, but also ancient. It was really rural, but appealed to my avant-garde tastes somehow,” he said. There was something in Holcomb’s playing that seemed to defy time while simultaneously confirming time, reiterating a continuum: “I was hearing a man confronting the dilemma of his own existence,” is how Cohen put it later.

In February of 1961, Cohen convinced Holcomb to travel from Daisy to New York City to record some songs for Folkways, and to perform at the inaugural Friends of Old Time Music concert, which was held in the auditorium of a public elementary school in Greenwich Village (tickets cost $1.50), and also featured the New Lost City Ramblers on the bill. It was Holcomb’s first live appearance anywhere. He was keenly, hungrily received.

Cohen also made two short documentary films celebrating Holcomb’s work. In the opening minutes of “Roscoe Holcomb from Daisy, Kentucky,” which combines footage Cohen shot in 1962 and 1974, Holcomb is on a porch swing, playing a banjo and singing. He is wearing a terrific outfit: vertically striped bell-bottom pants, a vertically striped short-sleeve dress shirt, and a wide-brimmed black hat. Cohen shuffles back toward him; the camera wobbles. For a moment, Holcomb regards Cohen flatly, peering over the top of his thick eyeglasses.

These days, John Cohen lives in an old rose-petal-red farmhouse in Putnam Valley, New York. His property abuts a fishing pond, and he’s converted most of the farm’s outbuildings into art studios (a squat structure near the main residence, once a working smokehouse, now contains stacks of 78-r.p.m. records and other crackling ephemera). On a recent Saturday, the writer, producer, and banjo player Eli Smith picked me up outside of my apartment in a rickety minivan he’d borrowed from the owners of Jalopy, a folk-music club in Red Hook, Brooklyn. There was a pumpkin pie and a loaf of lard bread tucked under the backseat. Smith, who is thirty-three years old, plays in an old-time string band with Cohen called the Down Hill Strugglers. They are, to my ears, the very best interpreters of traditional material presently going.

As with most historical genres—music connected, in some intimate, unfaltering way, to a different time—there are plenty of capable players imitating or expounding upon the old styles. The temptation to overperform it—to wear it like you would a vintage jacket, self-consciously but proudly—is awfully strong. Anyone who has ever heard a recreational blues band noodle through a set of covers has likely locked eyes with this void.

The Down Hill Strugglers, though—what they do is beautiful, easy. On the drive north, Smith and I talked about the importance of finding a way to inhabit this music organically, to locate something new in it, something germane to your station. He was humble about what that entails (extraordinary fluency, for one thing—both with the material and with one’s instrument), but Smith and his partners (Cohen, Walker Shepard, and Jackson Lynch) play these songs empathically, instinctively. They make them sound alive.

For Smith, that has something to do with understanding where this music came from, how it fits into various internal and external landscapes. It’s the same impulse that sent Cohen south more than five decades ago. “Roscoe is an extremely unique musician and singer, no doubt about that. But he was also, in a way, typical,” Smith said. “We can all enjoy, be amazed by, and try to learn Roscoe’s music, but the way that his music moves forward is through understanding the music of the Old Regular Baptist and related churches, and the songs and instrument styles of Roscoe’s time and place and his historic community.”

Holcomb grew up a member of an Old Regular Baptist church, a conservative, mostly Appalachian denomination that’s permissive of a-cappella singing (it’s referred to favorably in the New Testament) but has banned instrumentation of any sort. If Holcomb wanted to play banjo in church, which he did, he had to find a more permissive congregation, which he did. Still, that first way of singing stuck with him. The heavy, sacred vocalizing practiced by Old Regular Baptists recalls, in an almost uncanny way, ancient Gaelic psalms from the remote Isle of Lewis in Scotland; a few days after our trip upstate, Smith fixed me a salami sandwich and played me a few of those psalms in his living room in Brooklyn. The tones, the phrasing, the melodies—everything was identical, as far as I could tell, outside of the language being sung. It was a remarkable mirroring. There was a sense, listening to it, that the music Holcomb made was rooted in something more human, more universal, than even he could have recognized.

“Sometimes, you know, you feel like playing certain songs,” Holcomb said to Cohen in 1962. “I feel like playing the old banjo, I feel like playing some religious songs. I sit down, I feel lonesome. I could play you some of these old religious songs and it just fits me plumb through. Or I could pick up the guitar—the guitar is mostly for the blues. It’s just according to what a man feels, what he’s got on his mind.” That’s as close as Holcomb ever comes to explaining it.

That Saturday, when Smith and I arrived at Cohen’s farmhouse, he was nearly done preparing a big pot of chicken soup. Smith sliced some bread, poured glasses of water. Over lunch, we talked briefly about the machinations involved in getting Holcomb to San Diego to perform the set that would eventually comprise the new release, “Roscoe Holcomb: San Diego State Folk Festival, 1972,” which is the first complete concert of Holcomb’s ever issued commercially.

Holcomb hadn’t travelled too much in his life; he disliked flying. But that spring, Cohen helped him plan a small tour, beginning in Oklahoma and moving to the West Coast. “I had persuaded Roscoe to get on a bus to Lexington, Kentucky, where I’d meet him and we’d fly on from there. On the way to the airport, there was a huge traffic jam and I was stuck on the George Washington Bridge for more than an hour,” Cohen recalled. “I knew that the flight I was supposed to be on to get to Lexington was leaving without me. And there was Roscoe, who’d never travelled. He’d extended himself and I wasn’t there,” he continued. “I kind of freaked out at the airport. They said they’d fly him out to St. Louis and we could meet there. But I got to St. Louis and he wasn’t there. I called the airport in Lexington. I just jumped over the desk and grabbed the phone: ‘Look, there’s an old man there, and he’s got a banjo, and he’s never travelled before and he’s expecting me. It’s been many hours.’ They said, ‘We’ve seen this little guy sitting around.’ So they got him on a flight.”

The resulting performance may have been ordinary in the context of Holcomb’s career—since the early nineteen-sixties, Cohen had been helping Holcomb play brief tours and one-off concerts—but it is also the kind of thing that, when heard now, erases any doubts about Holcomb’s particular mastery. He utilized a handful of traditional banjo techniques: he sometimes played in a down-picked, claw-hammer style (also known, in Appalachia, as “frailing”), sometimes in a thumb-led style. Sometimes he up-picked. Whatever it was he was doing with his hands, it yielded a ferocious, galloping sound that’s hard to describe and harder to emulate. It is intensely, gorgeously mesmeric.

At the end of the set, Holcomb duets with Jean Ritchie, a singer and dulcimer player from Viper, Kentucky (another rugged little coal town, just northwest of Daisy), on “Wandering Boy,” an unaccompanied ballad with a melody vaguely similar to “Man of Constant Sorrow.” The song is from the Old Regular Baptist Songbook, which was published by Foster Ratliff in Lookout, Kentucky, in 1957; in “The High Lonesome Sound,” Cohen’s first film about Holcomb, he performs it in a lined-out style, meaning he introduces each line as it’s meant to be sung, a form of call-and-response singing that originated in Europe in the sixteenth century, when hymnals were scarce and literacy low. Here, in San Diego, Holcomb describes it as “an awful good song.” At first, Ritchie sounds timid singing along with him, as if she’s not entirely certain she can keep up with what he’s doing. But in the moments where their voices find a kind of cosmic synchronicity—look out, is all I’m saying.

Holcomb passed away in 1981, at the age of sixty-eight. The emphysema from the mines, the asthma—it all caught up with him. He’s buried in Leatherwood, Kentucky. Smith and Cohen made a stop there on a recent Down Hill Strugglers tour, paid their respects. After we finished eating lunch, Smith, Cohen and I sat for a few hours in Cohen’s living room, talking about music. Cohen eventually reached under a piano and pulled out the banjo he’d lent Holcomb for the Folkways sessions in 1961. He let me hold it for a while. There’s a little silver star inlaid on the fret board. It was one of those transformative moments in which you feel the whole of something—your country, maybe; some collective past—bearing down. There was nowhere else I wanted to be, could have imagined being.

*An earlier version of this sentence incorrectly included the musician Bill Monroe.